Natural resource stewards are increasingly confronting the limits of a conservation and management paradigm that relies on ecological baselines to guide protection, restoration, and other management actions. Intensifying climate change-including accelerated warming, changing disturbance regimes, and more frequent and intense extreme events-combined with effects of more longstanding stressors, is making restoration of past conditions or even ’holding the line’ in the face of inexorable human-caused change ever more difficult and costly. In response, managers are increasingly expanding their toolkit to include explicitly and strategically accepting or even directing human-caused ecological trajectories. New thinking in the National Park Service along these lines is expressed in several related new guidance documents including a report on the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework. The RAD framework, the culmination of years of collaboration among a diverse set of conservation partners, helps managers make informed, purposeful choices about how to respond to the trajectory of change. This presentation will describe the challenge of ecological transformation, introduce the RAD framework, discuss how applying it is shaped by a range of social factors, and share real-world examples.
Presentation PDF available upon request.
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